NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra: Biostar's Performance Surprise

Final Words

The Biostar TForce4 U 775 is certainly a performance leader for the Intel market if gaming is your priority and SLI capability is not important. The performance of the board in most of the synthetic and memory benchmarks was average, but still competitive with the Intel 975X offerings while outpacing the 945P solution. The stability of the board was excellent once it was set up correctly. The slightest change in settings when exploring the limits of the board would result in a constant reboot and CMOS clear activity that became unnecessarily irritating at times.

With that said, let's move on to our performance opinions regarding this board.

In the video area, the inclusion of a single PCI Express x16 slot does not provide SLI capability. If you require SLI capability, then the upcoming NVIDIA Intel Edition SLI-XE chipset or the recently released NVIDIA Intel Edition SLI-16 chipset will be required. The board fully supported our ATI X1900XTX video card in limited testing.

In the on-board audio area, this board offers the Realtek ALC-850. The audio output of this codec in the music, video, and DVD areas is average at best. The audio quality in gaming was acceptable for basic sound generation. If you plan on utilizing this board for gaming, then our only recommendation is to purchase an appropriate sound card. One of the new features of the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Intel Edition MCP is full support for HD audio. We believe it was a mistake on Biostar's part not to include an HD audio codec on their top-line board series.

In the storage area, the Biostar board offers the standard storage options afforded by the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra MCP. The board fully supports NVIDIA's Media Shield technology and offers RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 capability, NCQ, and 3Gb/s support. The board also offers the standard eight NVIDIA USB 2.0 ports, but does not come with Firewire capability.

In the performance area, the Biostar TForce4 U 775 generated outstanding benchmark scores in the gaming and media encoding areas. The overall performance of the board in other areas was average, but was still competitive with 975X boards while outdistancing the 945P board. The stability of the board was excellent during testing, provided that we had properly configured the BIOS settings. At stock speeds, there were no issues, but once we started overclocking the board, it became twitchy as we explored the limits of the board.

The Biostar TForce4 U 775 is a board designed and marketed for the Intel enthusiast on a budget, yet it excels as a gaming solution. Biostar is the first manufacturer to market with the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra solution and their results have certainly produced a board with a performance potential that belies the US$95 price target. The Biostar board performed better overall than our 945P based board and in the gaming area simply dominated it.

However, we feel that Biostar made the following errors in the design and execution of the board. The choice of the Realtek 8201CL 10/100Mb/s PCI Ethernet PHY is a grave mistake when the NVIDIA MCP chipset supports native PCI-E Gigabit operation with the proper PHY. Although most home network users will not exceed 100Mb/s operation, the lack of Gigabit capability in a board targeted to the gamer and enthusiast is not acceptable. The use of the Realtek ALC-850 audio codec is an error when the NVIDIA MCP fully supports HD audio now. The audio quality of the Realtek ALC-850 does not compare with their ALC-882 series in any area.

Our first tests with the board produced results that were below the Intel 945P boards, which is the intended competition for the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Intel Edition chipset. In some benchmarks, the results were up to 14% lower and the board lacked stability in most overclocking situations. Biostar and NVIDIA went back to the drawing board and released a highly optimized BIOS that improved some benchmark scores by 30%.

We were very skeptical of the performance increases that we witnessed as the new BIOS arrived with a replacement board for testing. We began to believe that we had a "cherry" board for testing and set out to discover if this was correct or not. We ran our entire benchmark test suite along with several other benchmarks through eight cycles with the same results. We switched out the video and platform drivers to previous releases and noticed at most, a 3% decrease in scores in the synthetic benchmarks while the game benchmarks were within a testing error of 1%. We also reflashed the BIOS with the public release to ensure there were no optimizations made to our version number. The test scores remained consistent.

We tested our other NVIDIA Intel based boards with the same drive image and the latest manufacturer's BIOS and driver updates that resulted in scores very similar to the previous test results. We then took the first board that we received and swapped out the BIOS chip. We utilized the same testing components in addition to the drive image and discovered (much to our surprise) the same or better results. We are confident the optimized BIOS is the differentiator in our performance results and not the board. We have been in contact with both NVIDIA and Biostar about our results. They both agree the performance increases we experienced are due to the BIOS optimizations based upon their internal test results. We received an updated bios from Biostar today that should improve the Self Recovery System and improve overclocking. We will report our results in the near future with this new bios release.

We believe that Biostar has done a masterful job in extracting as much performance as possible from the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Intel Edition chipset at this time. However, we feel like the optimizations in some instances have hurt the board's performance in the area of progressive overclocking and graceful recovery from going past the limits of the board. We certainly are excited about the performance potential of the NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Edition chipset as this particular board outperforms the Intel 975X chipset in several areas while maintaining a comfortable performance lead over our 945P board. We are anxiously awaiting the arrival of more NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra boards before coming to a final conclusion if it is a serious competitor to the Intel 945P and possibly the Intel 975X products.

Sometimes, mistakes are the portals to discovery and pleasant surprises.

Updated Results

As mentioned on the front page, Biostar recently provided bios update, NFUIA210.BST, which solved our reported Self Recovery System issues while improving overall performance and stability at overclocked settings. We believe the bios improvements provided certainly showcases Biostar's customer service ability in this situation while giving a better insight into the true performance potential of NVIDIA's nForce4 Ultra Intel Edition chipset.